Who gain most from a company-musician collaboration?

Different music strategies are seen everywhere in the market space. One sound branding strategy is to build powerful brands experiences through co-branding with music artists. This is used e.g. in events of live communication or marketing communication such as campaigns and TV-advertisement (Graakjær 2010, Graakjær 2008). I call these kinds of sound branding strategy Music Entertainment Approach (in comparison with sound branding strategies under Corporate Identity Approach that focus on developing tailor-made “corporate” music in collaboration with sound designers and specialized sound bureaus. See my previous blogpost on the subject). 

Endorsment and co-branding

One strategy is an endorsement strategy where the company uses a music artist to present the brand/product (e.g. Giorgio Armani & Beyoncé and SAS & Tina Dickow). Another and very closely related is the co-branding strategy where the company to a larger extent supports a band/artist e.g. Tuborg sponsors LMFAO’s latestmusic video. Brand endorsement and co-brand are efficient tools to develop and strengthening unique and positive brand associations by associatively linking to a certain kind of music with specific associations or to the celebrity artist’s personal (or band) brand. This way the company adds new brand associations or become an association themselves to the music, artist or band. 

A trend

Interestingly a trend has emerged where bands and artists seem to have taken on a more positive attitude towards selling their music to corporate companies. Arguably it is due to a market space for musicians where illegal downloading, free sharing sites and an overload of upcoming artists makes it truly difficult to make a living. Companies have increasingly focus on strategic branding through music and are (maybe?) more than ever interested in associating the corporate brand with a specific brand or artist. AsteroidGalaxy Tour and Heineken for example had such collaboration. 

Corporate music platform

Another sound branding strategy is to sign a band and become a record label (Bacardi & Groove Amanda) or establish an entire music platform for artists to evolve and exchange and create music (Hennesy Astistry, PepsiCo’s Green Label Sound and Royal Unibrew beer) Royal Unibrew has made a portal to rock music. It smells like an ambition to be the corporate “filter” from which rock-music is assessed; No rock-music without a Royal beer. 

Brand building

Brand strategies where the music industry becomes an important player (e.g. through co-branding, endorsement, or as a platform) all have the purpose of linking associations from musicians, bands, genres and lifestyles to the corporate brand image. Music can lead to significantly different impressions of the brand without affecting general evaluation of the product, depending on musical style. Heartbeats International argues on their blog that sound branding becomes an entertainment element that turns consumers into corporate fans (link to blogpost). 

Companies collaborating with the music industry cannot afford to treat music in an ad-hoc fashion. Music is a powerful tool to affect brand image as music represents not only a specific band or artist but an entire image, fashion, lifestyle etc. Music is a complex association network to “play” with and clear brand strategies are necessary for the company to be able to make the collaboration deliver financial results.

How do associations elicited from sound logos come to mind?

At the ExSl-project in the fall we explored how associations elicited from sound logos comes to mind to the consumer. The experiment was a pilot study to verify the potential of using the method of free association (as a top-of-mind exercise).

We found that there is a significant difference in the numbers of elicited associations across different sound logos and an apparent difference in the associative space that sound logos created in the mind of the respondents. As a method the experiment showed potential as feedback mechanism in the creative processes to implementing sound logos in companies.

Our motivation was to take one step back and ask which meanings the consumer actually attribute sound logos. Do they elicit recall of the associated brand? Are they actually recognised as logos, or identified as other sounds such as ringtones or other functional interface sounds? Are they perceived as music at all?

The experiment

The experiment was a full factorial design where all sound logos were presented to all subjects. 10 logos were selected from a pool of 48 sound logos. The experiment had three steps: 1) Association elicitation 2) Valence rating of associations 3) self-categorization of associations. 

As a top-of-mind exercise the sound logos were played and the subjects noted down associations (word or sentences). Then they were asked different questions to the associations.

The treatment of data was conducted in two steps; first the data was sorted for each sound to the given associations. Associations with similar meaning or wordings were renamed and clustered and associations was clustered. It was decided to leave out the self-categorization for further analysis; in most cases it was difficult to verify whether the test subjects had understood and used the category properly.

Results

A total of 1175 associations were collected. The average number of association per sound showed significant differences across the ten sounds. Similarly the average valence values for the associations elicited by the sounds also showed significant differences. 

The difference in number of association mainly came from difference between the amounts of associations given by the subjects. The difference between the average values can mainly be explained by an actual difference in the rating of the sound logos.

Read the full Danish version at CKO's website for the specific test results and tabel.

A cautious suggestion of a conclusion

As a cautious conclusion on above results I suggest that different sound logos are perceived differently and that complexity of the logo has a meaning to the size of the associative space. This may not sound as rocket science but above results verifies, after all, some basic presumption.  That sound logos are in fact perceived differently may seem common sense but further analyses will show that the associative spaces are not dispersed as one would think.

Discussion and further analyses

When looking at the overall associative space for the sound logos, the main surprise in the test is that references to actual brands/brand names are only mentioned in very few associations. Less than 5% of the associations mentioned the correct brand name related to the sound logo. It should be noted that the test was not designed towards testing the level of recognition. However, the low percentage could be seen as an indication that direct associations to brands, either true or falsely identified, are not as common as we would like to believe.

Next question is hence if sound logos are associatively linked to the brand at all? Further analyses on the associative space, as it appears in subjects’ top-of-mind written associations, is necessary to understand their meaning creation of sound logos. Associations from various media related sound occurrences, communicative, or functional sounds seemed more common which has been suggested by Graakjaer (2008), since sound logos share many characteristics with e.g. interface sounds in computers, ring-tones etc.

We will now go further with the analyses as see if sound logos are perceived as e.g. functional sounds (ringtones, interface sounds in e.g. computers), as small pieces of music o rare actual representations of brands.